The Body As Haunted · Pixie Bruner
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Every body is haunted. The question is what we allow to live there.
In The Body as Haunted, Pixie Bruner opens the doors and lets everything in.
Ghosts. Cancer. Sex. Mothers. Lovers. Rage. Consumer culture. Jewish memory. Bad poetry. Good fucks. Bodies that betray us, bodies other people try to define for us, and bodies stubborn enough to keep wanting long after they have every reason not to.
Bruner’s debut collection is a visceral collision of horror, confession, satire, grief, desire, and black humor. These are poems with scalpels in their pockets and lipstick on their teeth equally willing to dissect the culture around us and the vulnerable flesh beneath it.
Nothing escapes examination: our obsession with beauty and thinness, the commodification of bodies, social-media performance, literary pretension, sexual violence, illness, mortality, gender, aging, love, and the dangerous human hunger to be seen and remembered.
Yet beneath the knives, ghosts, blood, and wicked laughter lies something startlingly tender.
A daughter lights a candle for her dead mother. A lover longs to become permanent in a world where everything washes away. Two bodies cling together against the possibility of loss. Hope pushes through concrete like a dandelion where nothing tender should have survived.
The Body as Haunted is for readers who want poetry that does more than comfort them. It provokes. It seduces. It wounds.
It laughs at the wound.
And then, when we are no longer looking, it reaches inside and touches something painfully alive.
Enter willingly.
The ghosts are expecting you.
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Pixie Bruner (SFPA/Dread Writers Society) is a writer and cancer survivor. She lives in Atlanta, GA, with her doppelgänger and deranged cats. Her twice Elgin-nominated poetry book The Body As Haunted was published in 2024. (Authortunities Press). Her words are in Space & Time Magazine, Amazing Stories, Weird Fiction Quarterly, Abyss & Apex, Strange Horizons, Spectral Realms, and many more. She wrote for White Wolf Gaming Studio. Werespiders ruining LARPs were her fault. 2025 Rhysling Award Chair Survivor. 2025 Kay Snow Prize Winner.
